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Closing Argument

IN CONTEMPT By Christopher A. Darden with Jess Walter. Illustrated. 387 pp. New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins Publishers. $26. SOME historical controversies seem baffling. In the great Russian Orthodox schism of the 1600's, for example, people were burned at the stake over such questions as whether you should extend two or three fingers when making the sign of the cross. A few hundred years from now, students may be similarly puzzled by our national obsession with the trial of O. J. Simpson. But like those old Russian autos-da-fe, the trial was about more than one person's innocence or guilt.

For one thing, this trial of a celebrity was a lesson in the power of celebrity itself. It took the star-struck Los Angeles police nine separate visits to the Simpson home over the years before anyone dared give the famous football hero even the mildest legal slap on the wrist for domestic violence. And now, after 121 lines carried video feeds out of the courthouse, still more celebrities have been created, with all of them, it seems, cashing in through books, screenplays, videos and lecture dates. Almost the only member of the cast we're not scheduled to hear from is the akita that barked in the night.

Yet something more than mere celebrity kept us all riveted to our television sets. For thousands of years, people have been writing about what happens when the mighty fall -- portraying the classic dramatic conflict between the power of earthly riches and the power of moral judgment. In this case, of course, earthly riches won. But as in an ancient Greek drama, we, the audience, know that the ultimate outcome will be grim. With the overwhelming majority of Americans believing him guilty, what kind of life can O. J. Simpson lead now? Surely one of facing cold stares, of needing high walls and bodyguards, and of living within an ever-smaller cocoon of paid sycophants. His is the hollowest of victories.

This trial will never have its Sophocles, because Mr. Simpson cannot possibly qualify as a tragic figure. But if there was anyone involved in the case whose position seemed a painful and difficult one, filled with an inherent tension not easily resolved, it was the prosecutor Christopher A. Darden.

The District Attorney's unsuccessful attempt to defuse the trial's racial overtones required a prominent black member of the prosecution team. Yet it was not easy to be the black prosecutor of a black hero, who the majority of black Americans hoped would be found innocent. The better Mr. Darden did his job, the more angry at him they became. He had to play his onerous role in a racially polarized city whose long-simmering conflicts had exploded after the shocking acquittal of the four Los Angeles policemen who had beaten the black motorist Rodney King. Furthermore, Mr. Darden, along with the other Simpson prosecutors, found that one of their key witnesses, Detective Mark Fuhrman, trapped by his own search for celebrity, had made a string of appallingly racist remarks to a screenwriter.

During the trial Mr. Darden seemed, unlike many on view, as if he might be a decent human being. "In Contempt" leaves you convinced of this. It also has a few revealing scenes that we never saw on television. One is of the defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran, in a rare moment of non-sleaziness, privately hinting to Mr. Darden that he shouldn't call Detective Fuhrman as a witness. Another, amazingly, is of the bumbling Judge Lance Ito accepting Mr. Cochran's help in getting football tickets for a juror. Mr. Darden also long-windedly describes how the defense lawyers outwitted him in the famous episode in which Mr. Simpson tried on the murder glove in court -- although here the most interesting behind-the-scenes revelation is of Mr. Cochran asking Judge Ito for "a wide shot, not a tight shot," of Mr. Simpson's hands from the television camera. Was the real audience the jury or CNN viewers?

But on the whole, Mr. Darden's book is disappointing, because it, too, is touched by the disease of celebrity. Since celebrity evaporates quickly, publishers are rushing the books out at lightning speed. (One defense lawyer, according to Mr. Darden, was apparently drafting his own book on a laptop computer in court while the trial was going on.) The only way publishers can meet their accelerated deadlines is by assigning each instant celebrity a high-speed co-writer.

Books produced this way -- de- signed, as it were, to be read in airports -- have certain similar features: short sentences, colorful anecdotes, frequent one-sentence paragraphs, fast-paced dialogue that can be transplanted directly to the screenplay. These books abound in sentimental affirmations ("I thought of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, as I often did when things got tough"), rhetorical questions ("What could I say to Nicole and Ron? That I was sorry their murderer went free because of the deep chasm that racism and slavery have carved in this country?") and overheated imaginary monologues in italics ("Through the window, you watched Nicole put away the dishes, didn't you? She finished and then she lit some candles and you watched her, the way you had watched her so many times before, on so many dry runs"). Heaven forbid that an author should burden you with a carefully reasoned argument -- there's no time for that if your flight may be called at any moment.

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With books like this, you never really know whose voice you're hearing. For instance, somebody -- either Mr. Darden or his co-writer, the journalist Jess Walter, or someone on the squad of editors that rushed this book through the presses -- is obsessed with men's suits. "O. J. Simpson was wearing what had to be a thousand-dollar suit," a prosecutor "began to rustle in his expensive suit," Mr. Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers wore "very expensive suits," Mr. Cochran was "leaning on the podium in his off-white, linen suit." Is this suitomania Mr. Darden's own? We don't know. Other descriptions, like that of Ron Goldman's sister "haunting the hallways like a whispery ghost," have the unmistakable flavor of being injected into the text by someone else.

Nonetheless, beneath this annoying carapace, there is a human being. Mr. Darden's own life was a hard climb up from the edge of poverty; a drug addict brother was dying of AIDS during the trial. Mr. Darden was a college track star, but is wise enough to see how athletic scholarships harm black students who spend all their time training for sports at which, of course, 99 percent of them will never earn a living.

Before taking on the thankless O. J. Simpson job, Mr. Darden spent several years in a special unit that prosecuted many corrupt and racist police officers. He is routinely stopped by the police several times a year, he says, because a black man driving a Mercedes is automatically under suspicion. He was always totally convinced of Mr. Simpson's guilt, but that didn't make his job as prosecutor any easier. He received hate mail and death threats, and was repeatedly called an Uncle Tom.

Mr. Darden's uncomfortable role was made all the worse by Johnnie Cochran. Surrounded at the close of the trial by Nation of Islam bodyguards, Mr. Cochran shamelessly played on the jury's racial feelings. He even patronizingly said to Mr. Darden that after the trial was over, he would "see what we can do about getting you back in" the black community in Los Angeles.

Near the end of the book -- and here it feels like Mr. Darden himself talking, not a co-writer conjuring up whispery ghosts -- Mr. Darden says: "As a young man, racism seemed to me a single-edged knife, one that whites used to hold blacks down. Now I see that our own racism can be as dangerous and insidious as that which we have battled for centuries. . . . We cannot defeat their racism with our own; we cannot defeat bigotry by cheating justice."

Mr. Darden is right. Now that all the celebrities have gone their separate ways, the larger, saddest lesson of the Simpson case is that racism does not make its victims noble. Like any other kind of evil, it just breeds more of itself.

Adam Hochschild has written widely on human rightsissues. A collection of his essays and reportage will be published next year.